You want to invest in rental properties. You're serious about it, but your local market just doesn't work.

Prices are high, cash flow is thin, and you don't want to gamble on appreciation.

So what do you do? Do you wait? Do you compromise? Or do you change markets altogether?

In this episode, I'm talking with an investor who faced that exact decision.

We'll walk through what actually changes when you invest out of state, what doesn't,

and how to design systems and recruit a team so that distance doesn't destroy your investing

success.

We haven't met yet. My name is Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson, And on this channel, I teach you how to use a small and mighty style of real estate investing to achieve financial freedom so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. Now let's go to my conversation with Bay Area real estate investor, Ben Bidovich. So, Ben, I want to get into your real estate business, the fact that you have 13 units that you have accumulated both on your own and with some partners long distance from where you live in the Bay Area

of California. But if you're okay with this, I want to go all the way back before you even

got into real estate investing. And sort of, if you could, for me and for the people listening,

can you paint a picture of your relationship to real estate, personal finances, just, I just want to talk about

what is like to live at a higher cost of living area, just from the financial numbers standpoint.

And you're a teacher as well, teach personal finance. So just so people who can kind of maybe

relate to you as well, can you paint a picture of what it was like for you just in that

pre-stage. Yeah, I joined to the real estate aspect first,

grew up watching my dad work as a property manager. So I kind of had always seen what rentals are

like. He manages some buildings even to this day. And that gave me the exposure from a young

age. And I would go in there and help him out raking leaves or paint and walls, that kind of thing. But I never really thought of it as a business that I would pursue. But I was always kind of interested in real estate. So that seed was planted a long time ago when I was younger. And then growing up, I like a lot of people, I think just trying to figure it out in my 20s, what I'm going to do with my career and all that. And I fell in the teaching, which I really liked, and I was coaching sports. And so I was really just focusing on that. And then when I got a little bit more serious towards my, you know, later 20s, early 30s, got married. And then kids become a part of the picture. It's like, okay, we got to really drill down on the finances and make sure that we're setting everything up correctly.

So that kind of springboarded me to take action into out-of-state investing just because where I live,

it's a little bit too expensive to invest or to do house hacking or any of those kind of things.

So that was kind of the snowball of taking that first step out of state.

Can you, I mean, people who live in an area like that are going to understand these numbers, but just to paint a picture on the actual numbers, like what would it cost to buy, like when you're in your early 30s, you're teaching in the Bay Area, you want to buy an entry-level house there, or you just want to rent? Like, what are some of the numbers that you ran into when you were in that stage? I just want to show why it's more difficult to rent, to buy an investment there locally. Sure. I mean, I'll just use the numbers that we're working with right now. And we rent a house out for about $4,000 a month. It's a three-bedroom two bath, but it's one that if it was on the MLS, someone would buy it, do a lot of renovations to it,

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